cucullatus. Dodo. Competition by nonnatives, some collection. Mauritius @ 1688–1715.
That was all.
It had to be: the old man’s legacy.
•
Upstairs the women drew near her when she went into the kitchen—Portia and the gray one, at least, who hovered close at her elbows and plied her with questions. Angela and Ellen stayed seated at the table, forking up their frozen meals out of cardboard boxes with the lids peeled back; Oksana had come back and was counting pills into piles on the counter.
“It’s just a regular basement with a lot of closet space,” she told them. “And more skins for taxidermy.”
“Good lord,” said Portia.
“Talk about overkill,” said the gray lady, in a small chirp of a voice.
“I think these might be valuable, though,” said Susan. “I think maybe a university or something might even want them. Maybe they could be donated.”
“Dear, aren’t you late for the meeting with your lawyer friend?” asked Angela—as though Jim didn’t, for all intents and purposes, live in the same house with them. With Angela what was familiar frequently became strange, the near withdrew into the far distance and then came close again. She moved a cube of carrot around with her fork.
Susan had almost forgotten, she realized, after the basement. It was late but she could still go to meet him.
“Thanks for everything,” she told Portia, and took the back stairs up to her bedroom to change her clothes.
In fact she felt cut off and subdued. She couldn’t say anything to the old women, she was not qualified to tell them about the basement’s contents. She was marginal in all this and they were even further away from the matter: they had nothing to do with it. She couldn’t bear to say the wrong thing about it, disturb the truth with a false statement. She didn’t know what the legacy was, if it was important or run-of-the-mill, whether its specimens were real or reconstructed, contraband or legal. For all she knew they had been stolen in the first place. Best to move on, best to close off the subject of the mounts in the rooms beneath to casual discussion and quietly bring in her own natural history expert.
Best to leave out what purported to be the skeleton of a dodo.
10
When they got back she’d had too much wine—Jim had driven them home—and she collapsed on the bed, useless for sex. He kneeled at the end of the bed and took off her shoes for her, slipped off her skirt and lay down beside her as she pulled the sheet over herself, groaning.
“Ice water?” she asked, pathetically. “Please?”
“Sure,” said Jim, and heaved himself off the bed again. “I’ll brave the geriatrics.”
“Aren’t they asleep?”
“Some of them are nocturnally active.”
He didn’t come back immediately and soon she felt too dizzy lying down. To make her head stop spinning she stood up and went to the bathroom sink, where she splashed water on her face. She found some aspirin in the medicine cabinet and swallowed three tablets with tepid water drunk messily from the tap. She thought of the shaft walled in bricks, the shaft that struck right down into the ground, and now it seemed to be imbued with a mysterious and magnetic attraction . . . down into the earth, down below, into the caverns that for years had known no footfalls but her own. She thought of the stainless steel rungs of the ladder, which she had descended with care and with deliberation as though she were an explorer, a miner, a sailor on a submarine. When she descended the rungs of a ladder she had a direct, secret and linear purpose: she would open the doors. She would go down there now and open all the doors.
She expected to run into Jim on the way out of the house, take him with her down into the well. But she cruised through the empty, well-lit kitchen and did not see him, cruised out to the back, clutching her flashlight, stumbling awkwardly over pieces of ground in the dark. Still she often felt she was floating, elevated—no doubt due to the fact that she was so far from sober. Barefoot, she had to pick her way over the flagstones, not wanting to step into the cracks between them, not wanting to feel the hard nubbins of rock on the tender soles of her feet. She had never had the benefit of tough feet, never formed calluses on the balls of her feet or the back edges of